As companies and individuals strive to communicate better both within the company and to customers, individuals increasingly have more and more contact points. For example, one person may have multiple e-mail accounts, a work phone number, a home phone number, a mobile phone number, multiple calendars, and multiple social networking accounts. With all these contact points, it can be difficult to determine the best way to connect. This problem becomes exacerbated when attempting to contact multiple people to arrange a meeting or to collaborate on a project.
At the same time, individuals may prefer to be contacted using a specific contact point depending on the time of day and what that individual is actively working on. For example, if the individual is in a meeting, but is able to respond quickly to a text message, it may be best to send that individual a short text or email message. Presently when contacting someone in a meeting, one may call a mobile phone number only to get the individual's voice mail, and rather than leaving a voice message, one may send a text or email. This process may be repeated a number of times until all parties are available, which results in an unnecessary back and forth that generally wastes time.
Likewise, individuals regularly change their contact information such that databases of contact information can quickly become outdated. The result is that time is wasted when an individual attempts to contact an individual with outdated contact information.